The Turnhout Commercial Court has declared the company Van Steenbergen Transport from Arendonk bankrupt. This centenary company (it bought its first truck in 1919!) still employed about thirty people in Belgium.
The bankruptcy concerns two companies: Van Steenbergen Logistics and Arendonk Transport. Both companies had not published a balance sheet since 2023 and the last two financial years showed a clear deterioration in working capital, which had ended up in the red. The fate of the Slovakian company Q Logistics, which provided most of the transport for Van Steenbergen as the Belgian companies only owned seven vehicles, is currently unknown.
This bankruptcy application has prompted Frank Moreels, chairman of the UBT-FGTB, to respond as follows: “Van Steenbergen has participated for years in the system of letterbox companies, social dumping and structurally low rates. The fact that the company itself is now the victim of that same model shows how destructive that logic is. But one thing must be clear: the real victims are again the drivers, who have not been paid for three months. They lose their jobs, their income and their security, while the clients and the international chains wash their hands in innocence. In this dossier we see once again that multinationals – Van Steenbergen worked for Nike and Arcelor Mittal, among others – and large clients play a key role in disrupting the market. By systematically choosing the cheapest offer without asking whether that price is feasible, they create social dumping in their own logistics chain. Anyone who accepts a price that is objectively too low to pay correct wages and social contributions cannot claim that he is not informed. Dumping is no coincidence. It is organized through tender models based solely on price, with the perverse result of an unbridled race to the bottom.
